How Was She?

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What’s the lifespan of chicken? Well, it doesn’t matter because all of my mother’s chicken are gone. The chicken-pen – a small wooden structure that the local boys built as my mother sat on the verandah sipping her tea in the bright midday sunlight of shags- now houses new chicken with a new mistress. Everything changes when you are rested six feet under; for one, someone else takes over your chicken pen.
We sit in the rental Toyota for a second longer, neither of us willing to step out. It has just clocked midday. My hand rests passively on the knob of the gear stick, now on P. The car hums. The boma is silent. There are no chicken in sight, just the sound of birds without names.
My big sister says “haya” as if we had been talking about something and pushes the door open. My father is standing at the head the stairs. He’s smiling. Why wouldn’t he be smiling? He has a lot to be smiling about now. As my sister scampers out, I sit there for a little longer looking at the chicken-pen before I push open the door. Melvine hugs Simon. Melvine is the girl. Simon is the dad. Simon gave Melvine the name which, I only learnt in adulthood, is also a man’s name. But now Melvine is the man of our family, the lioness. She leads all of us. She settles disputes. She says, “Biko, you are wrong, cool off and do good.” She tells her small sister, “Keep your money away, a woman never spends all her money.” We sometimes disagree with her but we all listen to her. She thinks like a woman and then she thinks like two men. When the pillar of my mother crumbled to dust five years ago, we thought that was it, we would be scattered like grain during planting season. But strength rises from unlikely sources, and she rose and she now sits on the matriarch’s chair, a big force of a woman with the big heart of her mother and the stubbornness of the one who named her Melvine.
Hugging my father has never come naturally. He wasn’t the kind of guy who you hugged. They weren’t the kind of men who hugged back then. So he presses my shoulder. I press his back with the palm of my hand. I’m taller than him now because old age is now curving him. I feel his dainty weight with that hug. I feel his age with it. I feel his fragility as a man and our unresolved frictions with it. Behind him stands his wife.
I remember sitting in the sitting room on Sunday mornings when we were kids, watching KBC and hearing the deep murmur of my dad’s voice from my parents’ closed bedroom door. They would talk for hours because they did nothing on Sundays as Seventh Day Adventists. Apart from his shaving at the sink barechested, a towel covering his lower body, that was the strongest awareness of the presence of a man, an authority figure, in the house; that deep murmur of my father’s voice through their bedroom door. It rose and it ebbed slightly next to the softer, gentler voice of my mother. Finally she would walk out of the door to the sound of my father laughing at something she said. She was the funny one. He was the charming one. Yet sometimes he would make her laugh, he would make the funny one laugh.
I now see this charm again as he introduces his wife. How he effortlessly plays with his words. How he stands with that revelatory poise of fading youth. This is Rose. Rose is from a place I don’t catch because I’m observing her. She’s got big knockers. I didn’t take my dad for a breasts kind of person, to be honest. This is new. Maybe unsettling. You think you know someone for 40 years then they marry someone with big knockers.
But he’s 68 years old and was married for, what, over 40-years? He is allowed to marry a woman dissimilar from my mother. Now he’s a boobs- guy. Happy days. Melvine shakes her hand in the same way you would shake the hands of your landlord. She murmurs a nicety that turns immediately into vapour between them. Rose murmurs something back. They look like two form one girls who suddenly find themselves as roommates on the first day of high school. Rose looks so pious next to my father, almost girlie, shy, like the presence of my father has condensed all the girl in her. I also notice how close she stands next to him. Like she’s afraid we are there to take him back with us. Other than in church, I never saw my mother stand so close to him before. But then again I never saw them when they started dating in 1969.
She’s taken by him, I can tell because he makes some jokes, slightly amusing ones, but she laughs like he’s Dave Chappelle. He’s trying to make this look casual, natural, uneventful. She’s my mother’s size before sickness infested her heart. She’s the same height. She’s almost the same complexion, maybe a shade lighter; yes, Simon, finally going lightskin. Who is this guy?
But how can I not be happy for him? When we gather inside the house to pray, because anybody coming in from a journey or leaving has to be prayed for – she stands right at his elbow. She stands so close to him as if she likes to keep his scent around her. I don’t close my eyes in prayer, I stare out at the chicken-pen with a new owner, I look at his face and how age has curved his chin, I observe my sister, head bowed, and I know she’s only half listening to the prayer. I know exactly what she’s thinking. Directly opposite my father and his new wife, my mother looks directly at them from an old framed family photo when I was 9 and my sister was 14. Mom doesn’t close her eyes through this prayer either.
My father chats his daughter as I haul out shopping from the boot. It’s a week to christmas so it’s cooking fat and flour and blueband and detergent and toothpaste and sugar and rice and toothpicks and lotion and a shaver and salt and bread and jam and peanut and soap and large sodas…He loves Fanta. He will sit in the verandah, writing small notes on his old notepad, the radio playing and a glass of fanta next to him. Forget to bring him margarine but don’t forget his Fanta. It’s the only time I get to see the boy in him.
At lunch she serves my father. She doesn’t ask him what he wants and he accepts the plate without question. I’m relieved to see that she doesn’t sit on my mother’s favourite chair. Throughout the visit she never sits on my mother’s chair, she sits on one particular chair close to the door. That’s her new chair. That’s the new mother’s chair now.
Later, after lunch, we sit at the staircase with my sister and he and his wife sit on a sofa in the verandah. They talk incessantly. They laugh a lot. Rose laughs loudly, an unhinged and unrestrained laughter. Everytime she laughs out loud (my dad might just be funny too or maybe my mother’s humour was suppressing his) my sister turns and looks at me with a weirded look like she just swallowed a fly from her drink. I chuckle and say, “It’s fine, let it go. It’s love. You can’t fight love.” She rolls her eyes and we continue talking but she’s distracted because she’s trying to listen to what he’s telling her to make her laugh so often. I suggest we walk and say hello to some relatives nearby.
“You think it’s love?” she asks me as we stroll off.
“I think he’s happy.”
You can tell how his cheeks are now filling out again. You can tell in his eyes that the lights have come on. You can tell from his brisk walk, he’s limber, lighter, and his movements are faster. He’s no longer mourning. He’s loving.
We arrive in the next boma. The place where my uncle’s kitchen was is now a rubble, they moved it nearer to the main house and turned it into a store with a low door. It’s coming to evening and chicken are hovering near the door. A bored dog, lying at the foot of the staircase stares at us listlessly as we step over it. What are the ambitions of village dogs? At least city dogs hope to be driven to The Hub one day.
My aunt and cousin debate with my sister how old my father’s wife is. My aunt says she must be quite old given her elbows and her ankles. “Always check the ankles and elbows, they don’t lie. She must be in her early 40s.” I’m leaning against the kitchen door looking into that charade. My cousin, a firebrand, snorts. She says, “She’s older than that.” I think she’s younger than my sister, or her agemate. They debate on as my cousin cuts kale and her mother sits on a stool, leaning against a wall and my sister sits on a stool in the middle of the kitchen. “I think she makes him very happy, that’s all that matters.” I say. They all ignore me. Finding myself or my opinions unwanted I take a walk to the main gate and sit on a stone to see cars that pass on the dusty road headed up to the hospital where my mother died. There is no sadness, just emptiness.
The next morning as I went to my sister’s bedroom I happened to pass outside his bedroom. The door was opened and I noticed that the position of their bed had changed. Previously the bed was positioned such a way that if my dad sat at the edge of it after waking up, he’d be able to see my mother’s grave at the corner of the boma through the large east-facing window. Now the headrest of the bed was against that window. All this time seeing my father and his wife exhibit closeness I never felt anything but happiness for him, but at that fleeting glimpse of seeing the position of his bed changed I felt a sharp stab of sadness. I felt like they had turned their backs on my mother.
Of course the moving of the bed wasn’t my father’s doing. I mean, for years he hadn’t seen the need to change the position of that bed. Men don’t think of such things. We can live with the same curtains for years. We can live with the same curtains for so long that other insects can start living in that curtain, raising their own colony there, and seeing them through the insect-version of uni. So I knew that was Rose’s idea. Bedrooms doesn’t belong to men, how can it when you can’t find your yellow tie in it? We just sleep there. And so I guess Rose can place the bed where she damn pleases.
Suitcases packed in the boot we gathered in the sitting room and my father prayed. Rose stood next to him. Very close to him. My sister, head bowed stood still like a goal post. I stared at the veins running towards my father’s knuckles and noticed – for the first time – how they resembled mine. He probably has, what 20 years left in him if he’s lucky? Well, now he won’t grow old(er) alone. He won’t sit at the verandah alone at 80, with a vacant look, his walking stick leaning against a wall next to him, asking about his grandchildren. Now he has Rose, who is more of his wife than my mother. I don’t need a mother now, but he needs a wife. Nonetheless, she fills his house with warmth again, with affection and laughter and perhaps sex which feels me with such hope if my father – at 69- can still have coitus. Now she warms his bathing water and makes his bed, cleans his clothes, brings him his soda and knows which shirt he will wear to church and that he likes his trousers ironed with a line running down it. Now he’s alive again because life is for the living.
When he had called me earlier last year to tell me he’s gotten “someone to live with.” (He was shy to say, “I met a hot chick who can boil my soup”) I had asked him how they met and he had said she was his former student where he was teaching literature part-time at a technical institute in the village. I wondered how it had all started. Had he written “see me” on her exam paper? Had he told her, “Listen, you cognitive interpretations of African literature are a bit weak. I think you need extra classes. Why don’t you come to my home tomorrow we go through this?” and she had asked piously, “what about your wife?” and he had said darkly, “let’s just say she won’t mind.” So she had come over in her favourite kitenge and looked at my mother’s chicken-pen and decided there and then that she was going to get eggs of her own.
I would have loved to hear his answer to one question. A question men hate to be asked of their exes: “How was she?” I wonder how he fumbled through that answer. Or if he said, “Dear, please fetch my bible I want to read you Ecclesiastes 9:9.”